Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Carl Theodor Dreyer | Mikaël (Michael)

One might be
tempted to describe Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1924 film Mikaël (Michael), based
on the 1904 novel by Danish writer Herman Bang, as a kind of gay Der Rosenkavlier, with the elderly
artist Claude Zoret (Benjamin Christensen) serving as a kind of Marschallin,
sacrificing his lover, Michael (the Marschallin’s Octavian [Walter Slezak]) to
the Countess Lucia Zamikoff (Der
Rosenkavlier’s Sophie). Clearly, there are parallels, of which Dreyer could
have cognizant, particularly in the painful yet graceful way in which Zoret
gradually gives up his young model, would-be son, and unspoken lover; and the
fact that in the opera Octavian is played, like Mozart’s Cherubino, by a
(female) mezzo-soprano, creates, at least visually, a parallel situation. Like
the Marschallin, Zoret is surrounded by objects of wealth and culture to which
he has introduced to his young Ganymede-Icarus-like figure. And like Octavian,
Michael is seemingly blind to pain he causes his benefactor-lover.

Yet Zoret is no male Marschallin, being a
far-more pitiable figure, who is not truly a great artist and might have not
even become so recognized were it not for his young model, whose beauty and charm
graces Zoret’s somewhat kitschly-conceived
classical portraits. And unlike the grand world of Der Rosenkavlier, Zoret’s domain is a nearly suffocating creation
of a self-absorbed decadent who identifies himself with his precious
acquisitions, both material and, in this case, human. Although Zoret often
pretends to be a great aesthete apart from the world he inhabits, he is, in
fact, a highly conformist figure of the bourgeoisie, who like many matrons of
such new-gentry domiciles, brings out his expensive English glassware on
special occasions. He is, in fact, little different from his friends the
Adelsskjold’s, Alice and Alexander; and Dreyer makes the relationship between
the two obvious by paralleling Michael’s affair with the Countess with Alice’s
affair with the Duc de Monthieu (Dider Aslan). If the latter relationship ends
more tragically, after an equally bourgeois duel, in the Duc’s death, it is
only because Zoret, by film’s end, transcends his class and cultural
limitations through his sexual identity.

In fact, it is precisely this “transcendence”
through his homosexual isolation that helps to make Dreyer’s film such an
exceptional work of art. What might have been dished up as a kind of
soap-opera-like freak show is instead presented in an extremely subtle series
of events in which, through his focus on the rooms and objects of Zoret’s
over-stuffed abode, their attire, and a careful study of the character’s faces,
Dreyer conveys far more that what might have been conveyed if this had been a
talking-picture. As dismissive commentators have noted, it’s true that this
early classic of gay filmmaking shows no kisses, no overtly languorous stares,
nor even any hugs; but through head pats, a moment of hand-holding, and the
clear representation of near-nude figures for which Michael modeled in the
paintings, it is obvious, unless the audience is determined to be blind to the reality
that Zoret and Michael do not only share a house and an intense master-student
relationship, but, at least upon occasion, a bed.

Even long after Michael has gone upon the
chase of the Countess, leaving Zoret alone for a long period of time, and, after
running up debts in his entertainment of Countess Zamikoff, the young man returns,
ready, apparently, to resume to his usual chores of rubbing warmth in Zoret’s
cold feet—an act we would never expect of a pupil or even would-be adoptee. No,
this is the act of a younger lover.

Dreyer’s film (as perhaps did Bang’s
novel—there is, alas, no current English translation) assumes a situation that
often arises in such man-boy relationships, that the younger lover is bi-sexual.
And Zoret recognizes that reality is one which he simply must endure. The fact
that, from time to time, Michael spends his time eyeing the ballerinas, is
something the older rman has come to expect. But what he has not prepared for,
as his loyal biographer-friend Switt almost vengefully informs him, is that
Michael might really begin an affair with a woman who is not even a ballerina,
but a mutual acquaintance he has attempted to paint. That fact not only forces
him to face the reality that he may lose his beloved boy, but that, in many
ways, he already has lost the youth as Michael has grown up in front his eyes,
now ready to sever his life from his mentor. More devastatingly apparent,
moreover, is Zoret’s gradual realization that his talent is not a great one;
the artist could not complete the Countess’ portrait, only Michael accomplishes
that by bringing it to life through capturing the beautiful woman’s eyes.

Eyes or faces, accordingly, become a
central theme in Dreyer’s work, as time and again, he focuses his camera upon
his character’s faces in a manner that may seem quaint or even melodramatic to
contemporary audiences, but which allow his silent audiences to study their
personalities and, obviously, seek out the character’s desires. Michael, in
particular, although a handsome man in physique and form, has eyes that
absolutely sparkle—at least as Dreyer represents them. So too is the Countess a
beautiful woman, with eyes that, as Zoret perceives, bring her to life. But
what we soon learn about each of these figures is that they are all three blind
to each other, unable to read one another’s hearts.

Blinded by his love for the Countess,
Michael dares to sell Zoret’s best painting of him, “The Victor” behind the
artist’s back in order to support the penniless and in-debt woman. Yet Zoret,
despite his great pain in hearing of the sale, controls his emotions by
secretly buying it back and returning it, with enormous generosity, to his
former lover. As critic Jim Clark has perceptively observed (in one of the most
thoughtful essays on this film published on his “Jim’s Reviews” blog) our
hero—and it is important to recall that the gay figure Zoret, not Michael, is
the center of this film—behaves in a manner that we will not again encounter in
films with gay figures for another half-century or more. Unlike most of the gay
figures of later films until recently, Zoret, obviously suffering from loss of love,
rejection, and the degradations of age, does not have a psychological breakdown
ending in suicide. Rather, he accepts the slings and arrows of lost love with
graceful equanimity, much like Der
Rosenkavlier’s the Marshallin. If his loneliness and sadness end,
predictably, in death, it is, nonetheless, a death of a man who has lived life
to the full rather than an isolated and closeted sexual being. In fact,
Dreyer’s script (I see none of the usually overstated Mabuse-like theatrics of
the named collaborator, Thea von Harbou, in this work) suggests that Zoret’s
love for Michael grows even stronger through the sacrifices he has made.

Dreyer’s somewhat cryptic opening statement
“Now I can die in peace, for I have seen true love,” in my point of view,
refers directly to his own love of Michael, to whom in his last will he leaves
everything, as opposed to commenting on Snitt’s loyal presence, Michael’s love
of the Countess or, even less rationally, the Countess’ love of Michael. And,
accordingly, with only the ungainly second-hand lover Snitt at his side, Zoret
dies with a transcendent vision that love does not necessarily have to be a
unilateral expression in order to be of significance to one’s life. The act of loving matters more, sometimes, than
love as an acquisition—something received and held within.

Oddly enough, the object of that love, and of
the smothering caresses within the Countess buries him to prevent the youth
from running to the bed of his former Master, is the only being in this film
who, we project, will ultimately discover he has no real love to turn to. As
Clark points out, the movie, resolving its many loose strands one by one, ends
in a kind of stasis, not only with Zoret’s physical death, but with Michael’s
spiritual death. We can only imagine that Michael one day, having spent the
money bequeathed to him, will discover that he lost even that which he has
mistaken for love.

Biographies report that Dreyer was
evidently a very private man, whose own love life, is little known, made more
complicated by the fact that Dreyer’s major biography by Maurice Drouzy has yet
to be translated into English. Moreover, new information has continued to arise
about Dreyer and his films over the past few years; and Drouzy has suggested
newer findings, suggesting that perhaps in the 1930s, after making Michael, Dreyer may have engaged in
temporary homosexual relationships which ended in his nervous breakdown. What
is clear from seeing this early Dreyer film, is that, if nothing else, Dreyer
was most sensitive even before acting on his own sexual inclinations to gay
sexuality, permitting his film to sensitively and even unpredictably express
what it might really have meant to be a gay artist early in the 20th
century.

What also becomes apparent through this film
is that the Germany in which this fiction was made was more open and accepting
of a sexual situation that most countries would reject for many decades to come.
New York Times critic Mourdant Hall,
for example, described the story as being “handicapped by queer titles,” and
criticized the film for presenting “less than favorable national figures on the
screen.” The truth is that the hero of this lovely portrait is far more
favorably presented than was Wilde’s secret acquirer in The Portrait of Dorian Gray.